


From the River Dark

by lotesse



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Angst, Episode Tag, M/M, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-08-22
Updated: 2008-08-22
Packaged: 2017-10-02 17:31:03
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,256
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lotesse/pseuds/lotesse
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A belated post-ep for 97 Seconds. House sticks knives in wall sockets and loves Wilson - naturally, there has to be fallout.</p>
            </blockquote>





	From the River Dark

Cuddy wasn't going to hold him on suicide watch. For one simple reason - he wasn't suicidal. He hadn't been trying to off himself, he'd been practicing an informational exploration, replicating a condition to test a result. A hypothesis. Furthermore, House knew for a fact that she didn't have the stones to imprison him. There was only one question in his mind: how long would she keep him before she signed off on his discharge papers?

Her heels clicked briskly against the linoleum as she strode through his door. She was wearing sage green. It looked good on her, made her hair look very dark against her dusky skin. There was no preamble before she spoke, no sighs or lengthy looks or signals of uncertainty. "House, I'm keeping you in for observation for at least another 32 hours."

"No you aren't," he scoffed. "You know well enough that I acted out of a reasoned impulse, taking all necessary safety precautions and making sure that my actions wouldn't lead to any sort of tragic demise. I'm clearly not suicidal, therefore you have no grounds for holding me."

She raised a slim eyebrow. He threw her a deliberately corny, vaudevillean smile, and then she finally sighed. "No, I'm not," she said, "but I should." She made a notation on his chart, looked down at it for a long moment, and then put it down and met his eyes squarely. "You should know that the only reason I even considered letting you go is because Wilson vouched for you. I don't trust your judgment. I trust his."

Her earnestness was irresistible - he couldn't not mock that kind of behavior. "I understand, mommy, I've been bad and now Jimmy's your favorite. Will the spanking be delivered now or later?"

Cuddy sighed again, turning to give him one last look before she left. He noticed that there were fine lines around her mouth and at the corners of her eyes. After the door had closed behind her, House leaned down and fished up his chart. She'd marked him as suitable for release, no need of a psych eval.

It took hours to get out of the hospital - paperwork, paperwork, and yet again more paperwork. Everyone and their brother wanted a signature from him. House wondered if this was what it would be like to be a rock star. He knew why there were so many hoops set up for him to jump through. His release was highly irregular, and the risks of liability were huge. If the hospital released a suicide, if someone died because they'd waived the psych evaluation, there'd be all hell to pay. He didn't really care. He just wanted to go home. He'd stuck a switchblade into an electrical socket because he wanted answers. The one person he'd wanted to talk to about those answers had died before he could be of any use. House was tired, and he wanted nothing more than to go home, take a hot shower, and spend some quality time with George Gershwin. Sleep for a year or so.

He had to go up to his office first. He'd left his car keys on top of his desk. A nurse had helped him to change back into his jeans and t-shirt. He couldn't manage the buttons due to the burns on his hand.

Grab the car keys, get home to a neat whiskey and his tivo and a sofa where he could stretch out his leg - those were the only things on House's incredibly tired mind. At least they were, before he pulled open the door to his office.

Someone was there. The lights were off, the room dark and full of shadows. House's eyes focused through the darkness, and made out the hunched shape of a green-shirted back curled over his desk. Whoever it was, it wasn't quite silent - he heard a pattern of low, stifled sounds that might have been sobs, becoming more and less frequent, more and less intense. House has to stand in that doorway for a long moment before his incredibly tired, blasted-out brain could process the unexpected development.

It was Wilson sitting there in the dark; House could see the familiar outlines of his body now against the darkness, the characteristic set of his shoulders, his compact hands curving up over his neck protectively. As if there would be anyone else in his office at that hour of the night. He reached blindly for the lights, flipping on only the small, dim ones close to the door. He would rather not jostle the ache that was building in his skull, and knowing Wilson he likely had a headache to match.

In the increased light, House could see that Wilson's head was down, his dark hair falling over his neck in abject disarray. He was crying. No, Wilson was weeping. His whole body convulsed with each breath. He was nearly silent, but that was because he was working to keep himself quiet, not because he was just letting off a few sniffles.

"Did someone die?" House asked from the doorway. He meant it as a joke but it came off as somehow less flippant and more strangled. Wilson looked up sharply, and House felt his chest tighten and his breath come short. Hell. There was a tension in his features that bespoke the onset of a fairly devastating migraine. Wilson looked ridiculously young, not to mention unsure and heartsore, and House did his best to swallow down his guilt.

"House?" he said, uncurling slightly and reaching for his tie. Reflexive behavior, House was sure. He noted that Wilson's voice was low and ragged, roughened by his little crying jag.

"It's my name on the door. I think that means this is my office," House said, turning the admittedly pathetic joke as best he could. "As opposed to being the corner of the grade school where the girls go to cry over the boys who don't like them." He swung himself into the room, watching to make sure that Wilson didn't pull back as he came closer. Wilson didn't move; if anything, he leaned closer to House as he perched on the edge of the desk with his legs stuck out in front of him.

"I suppose," Wilson said, "that you'd know all about making girls cry." He craned his head up to meet House's eyes, protecting his neck with a hand that might have been trembling - House couldn't quite tell. "You told me that you loved me," Wilson said seriously. Disbelievingly. His voice raised in pitch at the end of the sentence, the inflection unsteady and oddly vulnerable.

"So? It's not like I've never said that to you before."

Wilson nodded slightly, but his deep-set eyes looked very, very dark. "I know that you care about me," he said. "As much as you care about anyone. Which is apparently not enough to actually make any difference to you."

House bristled defensively. "What does that mean?"

"That means that you love me whenever it's convenient for you, but when you feel that it might be nice to kill yourself you act as if you're completely alone in the world."

"I didn't want to kill myself," he said in exasperation. "How many times do I have to tell you people that? What kind of idiot tries to kill himself in a hospital, right after he lets the nice doctors know right where his completely resuscitatable body is going to fall."

The dark head fell back down again, resting on outstretched hands. "House," Wilson said, voice muffled by the palms pressed against his face, "you still could have died. You know," he said, looking up again, "just how easy it would have been for you to have damaged something permanently. The human body is too damn delicate for you to treat yours like this. You may not have wanted to die, but when you took out that knife you certainly didn't care whether or not you lived. You didn't…love me…enough to bother with the idea that some of us don't want to be left behind with the ashes of your life when you finally flamed out.."

House exhaled, at a loss for words. "Jimmy. I had to."

"Why?"

He laughed mirthlessly. "Because I always have to, Wilson, you know that."

"Yes," Wilson said to his hands, "but I keep thinking that you'll place some sort of value on your own life and somehow counterbalance your insane need to solve every puzzle in the universe with a healthy sense of self-preservation."

"See, that's where you keep going wrong. You assume -"

Wilson broke through the tentative rhythm of his banter with a jagged snarl. He sounded like an animal with a throat full of glass, and he swept out a reckless arm to shove House away from the desk. "Damn you, House, this isn't funny!" His voice twisted off into a sob, and when House peered down he saw Wilson's face tightening again, his eyes held shut, the creases under his eyes standing out starkly against the lax flesh of his grey face. "You're always pushing," Wilson murmured, "pushing on, pushing away, and I don't know - I don't know how long it's going to take before you actually do it."

He stood abruptly, stalking around the desk to stand in front of House with his hands on his hips. "I love you too, you idiot," he said tersely. "And one of these days you're going to kill yourself and leave me alone. You don't care about yourself enough to work to preserve your life, and you don't care about me enough to work to protect me from what's going to happen when you do."

House swallowed heavily, looking at Wilson standing in the darkened office with his body radiating anger and pain. "I'm sorry," he said lowly. "Wilson. I'm sorry that I hurt you. You know that I never mean to."

It was like he'd cut Wilson's strings. The younger man nearly collapsed down onto the desk beside him, his legs buckling from beneath him and his spine curling down again in a surrender to gravity. His head hung heavy from his neck. House could tell just by looking at it how badly it must ache. "They called me," Wilson said nonsensically.

"What?"

"I wasn't even here. Cuddy called me at home. I was asleep, and you were here hurting yourself. I should have been here with you. To stop you."

"I made sure you weren't," House told him gently. "I knew you wouldn't let me do it. And I didn't want you to be the one to find me. I made sure that it would be someone else - I paged Cutthroat Bitch, because I didn't want Cuddy involved, and I especially didn't want you involved."

Wilson shifted listlessly. "It isn't as if I don't help you kill yourself on a daily basis," he said. His voice was dull.

"I'll be better," House said hopefully, desperately. "I won't - I won't do it again."

Brown eyes met blue. "Yes you will," Wilson huffed. "Of course you will."

"Yeah. That still doesn't mean that I don't regret it."

Wilson searched House's face, turning the full intensity of his attention on his friend. "You mean it," he said. "You…regret…what you did."

"No," House drawled, "I don't. I had reasons, and they were good ones. What I do regret is hurting you." His voice dropped, became earnest. "If there was some other way that I could do things, one that would make life easier for you, I would. I don't like doing this, I just don't know any other way."

The sleeves of Wilson's green knit shirt were rolled up, and House noticed that his shoes were scuffed. His friend looked tired, and pale, and beautiful in the half-light.

"Let me give you a ride home," Wilson said. "You're in no shape to drive. Have you had anything to eat since you woke up?"

House shook his head. "I'm fine," he said.

"No," Wilson said, all depthless eyes and high cheekbones and caring, "you're not. I don't suppose you have anything halfway edible at home? Everything will be closed by this time of night. I can probably scrape something together from whatever scraps of nutrition you've got lying about the place, but at some point we're going to have to get you a real meal. You need the energy."

Suddenly, for the first time since he'd woken up, House felt safe. He hadn't lied to Wilson; he'd really and truly seen nothing at all, felt nothing, during his impromptu jaunt on the other side. It had shaken him. Every one else felt pleasure while they died, so why didn't he? It didn't make any sense. He was an inexplicable outlier, and it was uncomfortable.

But he knew, at that moment, exactly what the rest of the night would look like. Wilson would tuck him into the passenger seat of the surprisingly comfortable Volvo, and get him up on his couch with an improbably good dinner produced like magic from almost nothing, and watch inane television with him until both of their nerves stopped jangling. Wilson would crash first - he looked exhausted, and he didn't have House's stamina. He'd pass out on the couch, drool all over one of House's pillows, and House would eventually extricate himself from his friend's boneless frame and limp to bed, confident in the knowledge that Wilson was right there, that everything was exactly where it ought to be.


End file.
